Someone, an otherwise anonymous television producer or director making a film about the River Café restaurant, saw something, a hint of star quality. Bustling in the kitchen was a young sous chef, snapping back at the camera crew, obsessed and fascinated, and if he played a relatively minor role in the real world of Rose Gray’s and Ruth Rogers’ famed Italian eaterie, he was a star of the show when it hit the screen.

Few, then, in the mid-Nineties, could have predicted what the next decade and more would hold for Jamie Oliver. The dyslexic Essex boy born into the catering game at his parents’ pub in Clavering has become a multimillionaire, a one-man multimedia industry, an A-list celebrity, bestselling author, national campaigner and an MBE at 34. He has also become a brand.

And the problem with brands is that they can attract criticism, especially when they are built, or are seen to be built, on almost flawless ethical credentials. In Oliver’s case, having made his name as The Naked Chef (a reflection on the simplicity of his food, not his attire), there first came Fifteen, a restaurant born in a television series in which he headed an enterprise training disadvantaged young people to become chefs.

After Jamie’s Kitchen and the birth of his Fifteen chain came the 2005 Jamie’s School Dinners campaign, in which he lambasted the quality of meals fed to schoolchildren. More than five million viewers tuned in to see him trying his luck at the life of a dinner lady, beginning a campaign that reached all the way to Downing Street.

That was swiftly followed by Ministry of Food, in which he aimed to teach people in Rotherham to cook, and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners and Jamie Saves Our Bacon, calling for better treatment of battery hens and pigs.

According to Graham Hales, the London managing director of Interbrand, the consultancy: “Oliver is a likeable character that we all think we know. Most celebrities are rather vacuous, but he gets causes and makes things happen with a sense of energy.”

And the brand, whether consciously or not, was established. More recent additions include the launch of the Jme kitchen and garden range, the Recipease shop and cookery class centres and Jamie’s Italian restaurants. Three more Jamie’s Italians are planned this year, five next year, even in an inclement commercial climate. No matter: “Each of the four restaurants we’ve opened so far still has queues outside most days,” Mr Oliver’s spokesman said. “Even Oxford, which opened over a year ago.”

Then there is Jamie magazine (which recently said that it was doubling its print run), a Tupperware-style party plan business launched in March and a computer games venture. Critics, some fearing that Oliver is spreading his talents too thinly, have been gathering.

Recipease, for example, has attracted criticism for its high prices and swanky locations in Clapham, London, and Brighton. “Recipease feels expensive and quite out of tune with the times,” Mr Hales said. “The concept is not perfectly thought through.”

According to Ben McCormack, editor of Square Meal, a magazine: “Oliver sometimes seems less like a person and more like a lifestyle brand and the ambivalence between taking the corporate shilling from Sainsbury’s and Tefal and launching serious campaigns which necessarily are anti big business seems increasingly jarring.”

Mr Oliver’s team says there is no connection between his commercial and social ventures, such as the Rotherham cookery centre now run by the local council, from which he receives no income. Niall McKinney, managing director of Utalk, a website for marketers, said: “Oliver strikes a real chord of relevance with mass market consumers, who see him as the common man made good. The question is: [is it] all going to have the Jamie Oliver stamp of quality?”

Mr Oliver’s team fires back that every venture has “delicious food at its heart” and is run by “strong professional senior management”. “Brand experts probably look at some other chefs who maybe do stretch themselves and assume that it’s endemic with all ‘celebrity chefs’,” a spokesman said. “If we can’t deliver the quality, we won’t take on a project.”

The customer is unlikely to settle for anything less.

Counting down

£3.07m: Profit made in 2007 by the subsidiary that handles cookbooks and Sainsbury’s contract

£1.18m: Profit made in 2007 by Fresh One Productions, his TV company

£330,531: The loss made by The Flour Station, a bakery, in 2007

£1.2m: Dividend he paid himself

Source: Companies House

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